Interesting comments about climate science in an interview with Steve Coll, who has recently published what appears to be an interesting study of ExxonMobil:
Private Empire: Six Questions for Steve Coll?By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)
4. As you describe it, ExxonMobil has been deeply engaged with the global-warming debate. How has it gone about influencing the issue, and how would you assess its effectiveness?
When the Kyoto Accords were signed in 1997, many American industrial corporations opposed the agreement on fairness and economic grounds. ExxonMobil, however, led an additional and often undeclared attack on the science itself. It did so through ideological communications and advocacy groups led by non-scientists in many cases. This campaigning continued until 2006, when it began to back off some. In 2009, the corporation announced its support for a carbon tax, acknowledging for the first time that the risks of global warming justified a price on carbon-based fuels to incent diminished use. However, ExxonMobil has done little to advance this idea in practical ways, and I’m confident that its executives are satisfied that such a tax looks politically implausible at the moment. The legacy of the corporation’s campaign to challenge climate science remains significant. There is a wide gap between what the public believes global-warming science to hold and what qualified scientists believe it to hold. That gap was opened at least in part by ExxonMobil’s distinctive campaigning after Kyoto.
“You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.” Dorothy Parker
In the 1930′s? CO2 was well below 3500ppm. There weren’t a lot of cars on the road. Air travel was tiny. There were no DVRs, iPhones, tablets, and ice makers in refrigerators. In recent weeks, we’ve had many unhinged Warmists (who refuse to embrace the carbon neutral lifestyle themselves) pontificate over a heat wave. Yet, here’s what Steven Goddard found via a reader on the EPA website
Oops: Lisa Jackson’s EPA Shows Heat Waves In 1930′s Worse | Right Wing News
BTW, where's the Goreacle these days? Totally discredited...
A Deplorable Bitter Clinger
Further development- it seems ExxonMobil acknowledges human activity impact on climate change, but says not to worry. . .Climate change fears overblown, says ExxonMobil boss | Environment | guardian.co.uk
Tillerson, in a break with predecessor Lee Raymond, acknowledged that global temperatures are rising. "Clearly there is going to be an impact," he said. But he questioned the ability of climate models to predict the magnitude of the impact. He said that people would be able to adapt to rising sea levels and changing climates that may force agricultural production to shift.
"We have spent our entire existence adapting. We'll adapt," he said. "It's an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution."
Andrew Weaver, the chairman of climate modelling and analysis at the University of Victoria in Canada, disagreed with Tillerson's characterisation of climate modelling. Weaver said modelling can give a very good sense of the type of climate changes that are likely, and that adapting to those changes will be much more difficult and disruptive than Tillerson seems to be acknowledging.
Steve Coll, author of Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, said he was surprised Exxon would already be talking about ways society could adapt to climate change when there is still time to try to avoid its worst effects. Also, he said, research suggests that adapting to climate change could be far more expensive than reducing emissions now. "Moving entire cities would be very expensive," he said. Legislation or regulation that would help slow emissions of global warming gases would likely lead to lower demand for oil and gasoline, and could reduce Exxon's profit.
University of Reading - How much Arctic sea ice loss is due to humans?
Abstract: Sources of multi-decadal variability in Arctic sea ice extent - IOPscience
In short: The radical decline in sea ice around the Arctic is at least 70% due to human-induced climate change, according to a new study, and may even be up to 95% down to humans – rather higher than scientists had previously thought.
The loss of ice around the Arctic has adverse effects on wildlife and also opens up new northern sea routes and opportunities to drill for oil and gas under the newly accessible sea bed.
The reduction has been accelerating since the 1990s and many scientists believe the Arctic may become ice-free in the summers later this century, possibly as early as the late 2020s. : Study: Radical decline in Arctic ice is ‘at least 70 percent’ man-made
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Very subjective data IMHO. No evidence is really offered other than "implies"
When Al Gore cooked the numbers for his computer models in "inconvenient truth"; now that was "concrete evidence" what lying opportunistic scumbag he is.“Which implies that the rest is due to something else, and this is most likely going to be man-made global change.” .
Computer models aren't exact science. Fail!Looking across all his simulations, Day found that the 30% figure was an upper limit – the AMO could have contributed as little as 5% to the overall loss of Arctic ice in recent decades.
There are a lot of very compelling reasons to reduce CO emissions.
Clamoring away about GW distracts from them.
Human activity causing significant rise in average temperature of the earth? Check. Causing heat waves and storms? Not so much.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/op...pagewanted=all
The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
By RICHARD A. MULLER
Published: July 28, 2012
CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
^ about the author (Muller),......
Humans are almost entirely the cause.: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/op...pagewanted=all
and this is coming from Muller:
The founder and director of a climate change study project funded heavily by the Koch brothers, who last year reversed course and said he believed global warming was real, has gone one step further, writing in a weekend op-ed in the New York Times that he is now convinced the phenomenon is caused by humans.
In a piece titled, “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic,” Richard A. Muller, a University of California, Berkley physicist who founded the Berkley Earth Surface Temperature study (BEST) wrote that his, “total turnaround, in such a short time,” was driven by a new report from the group that concluded for the first time that global warming is a man-made problem. That revelation brings Muller essentially full circle from his stance a few years ago, when he criticized other global warming studies as flawed and questioned whether the Earth was even warming abnormally, dangerously fast at all.: Koch-funded climate scientist: I was wrong, humans are to blame
Last edited by S Landreth; 30-07-2012 at 07:29 AM.
Climate change is here - and worse than we thought
By James E. Hansen, Published: August 4
James E. Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988 , I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.
But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.
My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.
In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.
This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.
The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now.
These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.
Twenty-four years ago, I introduced the concept of “climate dice” to help distinguish the long-term trend of climate change from the natural variability of day-to-day weather. Some summers are hot, some cool. Some winters brutal, some mild. That’s natural variability.
But as the climate warms, natural variability is altered, too. In a normal climate without global warming, two sides of the die would represent cooler-than-normal weather, two sides would be normal weather, and two sides would be warmer-than-normal weather. Rolling the die again and again, or season after season, you would get an equal variation of weather over time.
But loading the die with a warming climate changes the odds. You end up with only one side cooler than normal, one side average, and four sides warmer than normal. Even with climate change, you will occasionally see cooler-than-normal summers or a typically cold winter. Don’t let that fool you.
Our new peer-reviewed study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, makes clear that while average global temperature has been steadily rising due to a warming climate (up about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century), the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide.
When we plotted the world’s changing temperatures on a bell curve, the extremes of unusually cool and, even more, the extremes of unusually hot are being altered so they are becoming both more common and more severe.
The change is so dramatic that one face of the die must now represent extreme weather to illustrate the greater frequency of extremely hot weather events.
Such events used to be exceedingly rare. Extremely hot temperatures covered about 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of the globe in the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. In the last three decades, while the average temperature has slowly risen, the extremes have soared and now cover about 10 percent of the globe.
This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.
There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.
Extreme weather events, such as the heat waves that have broiled the High Plains and Midwest this summer, smashing thousands of temperature records, are a direct consequence of global warming, according to a new study led by prominent climate scientist, James Hansen of NASA. The study seeks to reframe how people view the links between manmade global warming and extreme weather events, going farther than ever before in making direct ties between the two.
The study by Hansen, who first warned of the consequences of manmade global warming in landmark Senate testimony in 1988, shows that a new category of extremely hot summers has become far more common than would ever have happened without the buildup in heat-trapping greenhouse gases from human activities.
Snip
"This is not some scientific theory,” Hansen said to The Associated Press. “We are now experiencing scientific fact.”: Hansen Study: Extreme Weather Tied to Climate Change | Climate Central
Study: Perception of climate change
Abstract
“Climate dice,” describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons, have become more and more “loaded” in the past 30 y, coincident with rapid global warming. The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased. An important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (3σ) warmer than the climatology of the 1951–1980 base period. This hot extreme, which covered much less than 1% of Earth’s surface during the base period, now typically covers about 10% of the land area. It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small. We discuss practical implications of this substantial, growing, climate change.
Suck it
"Antarctic sea ice set another record this past week, with the most amount of ice ever recorded on day 256 of the calendar year (September 12 of this leap year). Please, nobody tell the mainstream media or they might have to retract some stories and admit they are misrepresenting scientific data."
Antarctic Sea Ice Sets Another Record - Forbes
Where's Al Gore when you need him most?
And...
Arctic sea ice shrinks to lowest levelArctic sea ice has shrunk to its lowest extent on record this week, surpassing the previous record set in 2007 and surprising experts studying climate change, a US body says.
Climate extremes are increasing.
^related
The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean dropped below the previous all-time record set in 2007. This year also marks the first time that there has been less than 4 million square kilometers (1.54 million square miles) of sea ice since satellite observations began in 1979. This animation shows the 2012 time-series of ice extent using sea ice concentration data from the DMSP SSMI/S satellite sensor. The black area represents the daily average (median) sea ice extent over the 1979-2000 time period. Layered over top of that are the daily satellite measurements from January 1 -- September 14, 2012. A rapid melt begins in July, whereby the 2012 ice extents fall far below the historical average. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)) will confirm the final minimum ice extent data and area once the melt stabilizes, usually in mid-September.
It's just shocking that the earth has been around for 4.5 billion years and the "green" scientific community after reviewing a 12 year up tick in the trend line (otherwise known as natural cycle) have deemed the meltdown is eminent...
The charts in this section - all "hockey stick" spin.
[quote=S Landreth;1860249]Stick it.
For those of you who are still undecided, keep reading.
Climate Scientist investigated (again!), vindicated (again!)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Starting with the need to show the whole picture of temps on earth, nit just a small (cherry-picked) up tick in trend.
I don’t want to spend much time trying to debunk your post (or anyone else who post crap on this thread) but you should read what scientists report and not what a blogger/non-scientist post.
Your post (image) comes from Watts Up With That? run by Anthony Watts a weathercaster (not a scientist):
Willard Anthony Watts (Anthony Watts) is a blogger, weathercaster and non-scientist, paid AGW denier who runs the websitewattsupwiththat.com. He does not have a university qualification and has no climate credentials other than being a radio weather announcer. His website is parodied and debunked at the website wottsupwiththat.com Watts is on the payroll of the Heartland Institute, which itself is funded by polluting industries.
Nor do I want to spend time debating crazies. Like the title of this thread suggests,…..
Good luck in your little world.Any doubts about Climate Change?
Stick it.
For those of you who are still undecided, keep reading.
_______________________________________________
A new video produced by independent videographer Peter Sinclair for The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media explains what expert scientists now find to be the lowest extent of Arctic sea ice in recorded history.
Last edited by S Landreth; 13-10-2012 at 12:51 AM.
Looks like the following report will finally put the nail in the coffin that is the MMGW controversary:
Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released... and here is the chart to prove it
Read the rest here
- The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures
- This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996
O dear it's the daily mail, so it must be true
^
Well, it were a government study just reported by the Daily Mail.
Reckon Al Gore is on suicide alert?
NO idiot ! It was released by the MET OFFICE and simply reported by the Mail and several other national newspapers. Just like the FACTS the ice in Antarctica has been growing since records began ?
It still won't stop the global warming lunatics from claiming we need to tax people even more to stop something that has already stopped !
Treat everyone as a complete and utter idiot and you can only ever be pleasantly surprised !
Sorry, but the daily mail has not been associated with facts for decades, what it has been associated with is the reality distortion field that pervades the tea buggers movement... And what we see mixed in with a little bit of what the met office released is cherry picking, distortions and missrepresentations.... Which you have missed because you have read when you want to see and cannot be bothered to actually read the oure document actually said.
that is one fact that has not been verifiedOriginally Posted by The Big Fella
as for global warming, the records show that we are in a warming phase, which is a commonplace event in geological history (the Thames used to freeze regularly 100+ years ago)
(all of Scotland and a large amount of England were covered in glaciers millions of years ago; the coal was produced by tropical forests, Devon was an arid desert, etc etc)
the matter in doubt is the question of how much human activity is affecting the rate of change of warming
there is, of course, no data to show anything either way
I have reported your post
Closing remarks of the article...So let’s be clear. Yes: global warming is real, and some of it at least has been caused by the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels. But the evidence is beginning to suggest that it may be happening much slower than the catastrophists have claimed – a conclusion with enormous policy implications.
No?
The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.
This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year.
Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.
Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released... and here is the chart to prove it | Mail Online
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